Pick of the Week Podcast

10.18.2009 – Episode #206 – Liberty Comics #2

Show Notes

Running Time: 01:08:05

October
18, 2009 – You think the show’s a little long this week? Well, you try keeping things under an hour with guest podcaster Chris Neseman of Around Comics and 11 O’Clock Comics in the house! We manage to quash the rivalry for the length of the show, and get to doing what we do best, making fun of each other, and also managing to talk about a bunch of comics.

Comics:00:02:45 – Sure Liberty Comics #2 is for charity, but it’s also many damn fine comic book creators making one hell of a stack of pages, and it’s Ron’s Pick of the Week.00:12:44 – Josh was completely down for the first half of Adventure Comics #3, and apparently, there’s a co-feature.00:18:45 – No one spoils Walking Dead #66. We don’t know why, but we just don’t.00:21:08 – Guess who’s complaining about Uncanny X-Men #516, and still he loves it!00:24:44 – Josh and Chris get into House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1.00:30:56 – The Anchor #1 from Boom! brings big mysterious dudes fighting big monsters in Iceland! And Josh was referring to Darkness Lodbrok’s Hand from Top Cow in the segment.00:32:58 – Ron is happy with DMZ #46 again. But for how long?!00:33:33 – How good is Steve Epting in The Marvels Project #3?00:35:00 – Ron is all about Green Lantern Corps #41 (Corpse?) and not so much about Blackest Night Batman #3.00:37:30 – Chris takes a time machine back to Beasts of Burden #1, but he’s a guest, so it’s OK.

Email:00:47:04 – Gary asks if there are any back issues we’d buy, regardless of trade availability.

Voicemail:00:49:22 – Ryan asks about the Superhero Squad cartoons. Ron brings it with “Not for me,” and there was much rejoicing.00:51:21 – Sam asks
about the Sunday strips, and what we think.Etc.:00:55:20 – Congrats to Jonathan Merrifield who is the iFanboy member winner for the Funimation DVD giveaway pack! Don’t miss the other great giveaways this month01:03:07 – Check our theMurmur Podcast #9 with Ron, Paul Montgomery, and Ryan Penagos! Zombies! Music! Tech!

Download

Subscribe

Get Involved

Doing the podcast is fun and all, but let's be honest, listening to the 3 of us talk to each other can get repetitive, so we look to you, the iFanboy listeners to participate in the podcast! "How can I get in on the fun?" you may ask yourself, well here's how:

E-Mail us at contact@ifanboy.com with any questions, comments or anything that may be on your mind.

Please don't forget to leave your name and where you're writing from and each week, we'll pick the best e-mails to include on the podcast!

I was a little creeped out that when I clicked on the play button, it synced up with what I was listening to in the store.

Great episode. Personally, I thought Beast Of Burdens was a beautiful mess of an issue. The art was gorgeous, but Dorkin’s writing was a big turn off for me. And I did read some of the anthology stories, so it wasn’t that I couldn’t follow it, I just didn’t want to. Chris is right that it’s nearly kid-friendly, but then so not. I don’t really know what this book wants to be, and I get the impression that the creative team doesn’t, either.

I’ll continue with making a case for Incredible Hercules this week. (Although I have made it my goal to make it as popular as I did with Daniel Way’s Deadpool last year)

Incredible Hercules #136 was without a doubt, the best single issue of 2009. I know a lot of people would say Batman and Robin #1 or #2 would be the case, and I would’ve agreed if this Herc issue never came out. But something is literally going to have to punch in me in the face to show how it could be better then Incredible Hercules.

It was full of great jokes and action, and it also might have one of the best fights in comics this year. Also, just the idea of Hercules and Thor switching up identities was just fun to see and read. Those two clashing with eachother is one of the big staples of Marvel comics, or at least during the Silver Age. Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente made this one of the highlights of the feud and just made it fun. I would also be remissed if I didn’t say Reilly Brown did an excellent job on the art. I imagined that he was used to make this look a lot like ‘Lord of the Rings’, cause he seems to be excellent at drawning elves, trolls, and whatnot in the Thor mythology. But again, he layed out great panels for the fight sequence and some of the reactions by Hercules/Thor were really funny.

Just a fun comic book and it’s seriously one of the best to come out for Marvel. If people are still missing out on this then they are seriously missing out on maybe the most exciting comic book to come out this year.

Overall a good show. I take issue that Ron’s biggest problem with Uncanny #516 was how Mags got his powers, and not at the fact that he got in his knees to praise Cyclops. I was fully expecting Ron to talk it up. Alas, I got nothing.

I was going to jokingly suggest naming the little one "Hawkeye Flanagan", but it kinda does have a ring to it. Or perhaps go the route Prince wished his parents went by naming him ‘Green Lantern symbol’, but actually just the symbol itself. When they need to know the spelling for the birth certificate, just point to the tat.

Great podcast as always. Nice to hear from Neseman who, and I mean this seriously, sounds a lot like my uncle. Seriously I was starting to listen to this and I’m like: ‘Why is my Uncle Jerry on the podcast this week?’ But it was just Neseman…..so maybe there was disappointment there I dont know.

Deadpool #900 was pretty iffy as a whole. Iffy is a good work for it….you don’t see it used often. Anyways there was some highlights (Kelly/Liefeld and Swierczynski/Crystal) but for the most part it was a pretty boring read. Not even Jason Aaron could keep me interested, in fact his story was probably the worst of the bunch. Shocking I know, but maybe he just isn’t suited for the character.

I think it’s both amusing and kind of endearing that, as long as Ron’s been reading X-Men, he still tries to understand the explanation for how Magneto got his powers back. And, you know, once he explained it, it kind of made sense and I realized it had been set up pretty well over the past year. Just, when I was actually reading the comic and Magneto was monologuing, I started exercising my skimming muscles.

@TNC: Haven’t heard the podcast yet, and I will not delve into hyperbole, but Incredible Hercules is quickly surpassing the funniest comic I’ve read. It is the best book coming out from Marvel, now that Captain Britain is cancelled. The recap page had me in tears. The Amadeus story from the last issue, though, suffered because it shared the book with a superior one. My favorite quote is from the last issue of Herc story…

Yeah, waiting till page 10 or 11 to see the title/credits page has been a pet peeve of mine for about a year now. What makes it bad is that, coupled with decompression, it can really take you out of the story; I find myself thinking, "Ok, we’re still on the FIRST SCENE, and nothing much has happened yet, and I’m on page 10 already, and it’s only taken me like two minutes to get here, and now FINALLY I get to settle into the issue?" The difference between this and tv shows that have a 10-minute opening segment is that the tv show still takes an hour to watch; you get like 42 minutes of content no matter what. For a comic, when that opening scene takes up almost half the pages, and it takes less time to read than it takes to listen to a Ramones song . . . the reader feels gypped. A similar feeling can happen when I see the middle staples of the issue "too soon", before much has happened or before the story has really settled in.

Heyoooooooooooooo…nice hearing Chris on iFanboy! Now that the guys have had both Chris and I on the show, we’re going to have to return the favor and have one of them on to an episode of 11 O’C sometime soon.

I’m a LITTLE disappointed you all weren’t drunk recording the show, but then again, we do have a patent pending on drunken comics podcasting.

@muddi: The Amadeus story is just as fantastic as the Thorcules one. It’s just great in a different way; mainly because Pak/Lente are showing more of thier nerdy side then their humor. Plus the art in that might actually surpass what Brown did in his arc, although that might be a bit too steep of a thing to say at this point.

Regarding DMZ, Wood said about 70 issues or so. During the War Powers arc I thought things were ramping up again, but the following issue fizzled. It felt like more coasting after that so I dropped the title 2 issues ago. This series cold’ve been better if it was shorter. 70 issues leaves too much room for filler.

I’m another one who hates credits that take forever to come. (Is there a term? Tantric credits?) It’s not like they add anything by arriving later; as Flapjaxx says, they delay my settling into a book. And credits at the end? Playing with tradition for the sake of it.

I once counted the time it took Alias to get underway and the record was 18 minutes or something.

I do read newspaper comics online, sort of; I read the Comics Curmudgeon blog. If you haven’t seen it, oh, are you missing out. This poor soul reads the quote-unquote funnies every day and offers his biting commentary. There are times when it’s the hardest laugh I get all day.